The use of self-serve salad bars has in recent years proliferated. While originally found only in sit-down family style restaurants, self-serve salad bars have expanded to convenience restaurants such as fast food establishments and truck stops. The self-serve salad bars can even be found in grocery stores and supermarkets near urban populations where young urban professionals carry the self-created salads home for consumption.
The popularity of salad has posed two distinct problems for dining establishments which offer such service. The resultant increase in volume at the salad bars has created a greater burden on the dining establishments to supply fresh food items. It is not unusual for an establishment to have at least one employee assigned full-time to the task of replenishing the salad bar.
The popularity has also resulted in a large number of customers crowded around the salad bars at peak hours. This makes it increasingly difficult to replenish the salad bar as access is difficult to obtain.
In salad bars, typically, the food has been offered in food containers which are placed in a pile of crushed, flaked, cubed or broken ice. The ice level typically approaches the top of the food container in order to maintain the food container and therefor the food at a cool temperature.
A problem in replenishing food items in the typical salad bar is that when the food container is removed so that a full container can take its place, the crushed, flaked, cubed or broken ice quickly fills the void left by the removed container, and the replenished container must be squeezed into the ice. This considerably slows the process of replenishing the food items.
To alleviate this problem, screens have been employed which hold back the ice to reserve a space in the ice for replenished food containers. The problem with the use of such screens is that they are quite nonversitile in that each size food container requires a different size screen and food containers of different heights end up being displayed at different heights.
What is thus needed is a device which helps organize the large number of food items offered to salad bar customers and helps make refilling of food containers both quick and easy. The device would also be versatile in use and inexpensive to produce. The present invention provides such a device.